This invention relates to a telephone system provided with a remote control mechanism.
Hitherto, there have been telephone systems provided with a remote control mechanism capable of carrying out a remote control through a telephone circuit.
Conventional telephone systems of this kind include means for detecting a call signal from a telephone circuit to automatically respond to the incoming call, and a PB receiver for receiving and discriminating a pushbutton dial (hereinafter abbreviated as a PB) signal from the telephone circuit, and means for judging a command indicated by the PB signal on the basis of a signal indicative of the discriminated result of the PB signal.
In the case of carrying out a remote control of a telephone set provided in such a telephone system, calling is first made through the telephone circuit. Thus, the telephone set automatically responds to this to send an answering message. Upon confirming this answering message, a user operates the key input section to send a command based on a predetermined PB signal. Thus, the PB signal is received and discriminated by the PB receiver. Then, the command indicated by the PB discriminated signal is judged by the judgment means. Depending upon judged results, various controls will be performed.
Thus, interruption of reproduction of the answering message, reproduction of messages from other persons, operation of the room monitor, and the like can be made by a remote control through the telephone circuit.
Meanwhile, a user of the telephone ordinarily wishes to efficiently finish his business, and to make the speech time as short as possible. From such a point of view, an approach could be employed to conduct a remote control after reproduction of the answering message is completed. In this connection, since hearing of the answering message is useless in the case of the remote control, the abovementioned conventional system is constructed so that the remote control can be initiated during reproduction of the answering message.
However, since the PB receiver is also brought into a PB signal standby state, while still being connected to the telephone circuit, the answering message is also transmitted to the PB receiver. For this reason, it is likely that the answering message serves as a noise for the PB receiver, which may then fail to acknowledge receipt of a PB signal even when a calling subscriber sent it. To avoid this, an effort must be made to input a command at the time of a break in the speech of the answering message in order to first stop reproduction of the response message such that a soundless state results where no other sound is present and, to thereafter input a desired command. With this method, however, the operation for inputting a command by the PB signal is troublesome, or there are instances where it is difficult to put this method into practice due to the form of the answering message signal.
As stated above, the remote control mechanism in conventional telephone systems is troublesome in operation.